Almost all apartment units are installed with a wooden door as protection against unwanted burglary entry. However, ordinary wooden doors are not strong enough to be an effective barrier for forced entries even the burglar only armed with simple burglary tools. That is because ordinary wooden door leaf and doorframe can fracture easily at its weakest areas near the door lock, lock-strike-plate, and hinges, especially when hammer, screwdriver or crowbar are used to crack open the wood structure of door sets. When the wood structure was cracked open, it will cause the lock and the hinges failed to hold the door in its closed position and create a security breach for millions of households.
Traditionally, there are three options available to enhance the security function of wooden doors: installing addition bold-lock and/or reinforcing the doorframe with external visible hardware, and/or supplementing with a metal gate. These options may prevent unwanted intruders but are not feasible for every apartment situations because of space limitation and appearance restriction, and may not even very effective.
For the bold-lock option, the concept of having addition locks installed in a wooden door may help to scare away burglars. This concept may be correct in theory, but doing so would require excessive drilling on the door leaf and doorframe, and would actually weaken its wood structure making it even easier to be fractured under external forces, and hence, defeated its purpose. Also the multi-lock system is costly, complicated and presents more chances of mechanical malfunctioning. Furthermore, it is costly, complicated and troublesome to repair or replace the locks. This option is not popular.
A second option is to insert or install additional hardware to an existing door or doorframe. However, since the hardware is designed specifically for certain types of door or doorframe, only a small number of households can use this option. Also, because the hardware is visible from outside and may damage the appearance of the door during insertion or installation, it may be easily available from hardware stores but not practical and adoptable by the mass public.
Another option is to install an expensive metal gate in front of a wooden door, as a supplemental security enhancement. The problem with this option is that it is not always feasible to install a metal gate in many apartment units because of its space requirements and possible violation of building fire codes. Also, many consumers complained about metal gate narrowed the width of their entrance, many dirty rusty parts, creating unpleasant prisoner feeling, boring design, very noisy, and too expensive. Furthermore, in many apartment buildings, metal gates are banned by property management or owner association who often would not approve any alteration or change of the appearance in common area. And in practice, metal gates are often rejected by the authority because the gate would swing onto the exit route or fire escape route or internal common corridor reducing the law-required width of such exit or corridor.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an improved wooden door system to reinforce the structure of the wooden door set (door leaf and doorframe) so that it can prevent the door leaf and doorframe from fracturing when burglaries try to have a forced entry.
The above description of the background is provided to aid in understanding a forced entry resistance system for wooden doors, but is not admitted to describe or constitute pertinent prior art to the forced entry resistance system for wooden doors, or consider the cited documents as material to the patentability of the claims of the present application.